Discussions on Geography and geospatial technologies

Category: Remote Sensing

NASA has teamed with Japan’s Earth Remote Sensing Data Analysis Center to create a new topographic map covering 99% of the Earth’s landmass. The maps are created using two sets of data from Japan’s ASTER sensor which are slightly offset from one another. Merging the data creates a 3D look like Google Earth’s topographic display. […]

Wind up the hoopla as, on September 17th, the NRO declassified the GAMBIT and HEXAGON series satellites. Gizmodo has an interesting photo collection while over on the NRO website there are various documents including fact sheets, histories and videos about the satellites.

NOAA just released a fascinating video showing the birth and death of hurricane Irene as seen from space. The video was created from imagery captured by the GOES-13 weather satellite. This lovely new satellite captures a view every 30 minutes and has been running for a little over a year (more to be found about […]

Wired has a beautiful article highlighting the views of US National Parks as seen from space. The views are simply breathtaking. I think a lot of people in the US forget our National Park system features some truly majestic and amazing places on the Earth. Looking at them from space gives a whole new appreciation of their […]

Climate models have predicted this for years, but it’s never been observed… until now. Ars Technica discusses the issue in brief. For the non-physical geographers out there (of which I count myself), storm tracks are the mid-latitude storm patterns that bring most of the precipitation to the heavy population centers in the world. As the […]

On Tuesday at the ESRI UC I spent the majority of my day wandering through the many tables and displays set up in the exposition hall. At first I was overwhelmed by the size of the exhibition hall and the number of exhibitors but as I walked through the displays I became impressed with […]

With the roll out of Cryosat’s first sea-ice map the BBC has posted (reposted?) an interview between Jonathan Amos, Science writer with BBC (does a lot of the space topics) and Dr Katherine Giles about how Cryosat works…which most of you already know, but it is a great description for a broad audience. Take a […]

Finding new pyramids in Egypt! Apparently a team out of NASA used IR cameras to find underground rooms of 17 new pyramids. It also found 1,000 tombs and 3,000 new settlements. Archeology through remote sensing. What’s cooler than THAT? Indiana Jones would be jealous 🙂

The R2 Fish School Kit that has been featured on TV shows like ABC News and Animal Planet teaches your fish to play basketball, fetch, and more. It was developed by Dr. Dean Pomerleau and his son Kyle. Their goldfish “Albert Einstein” is the current Guinness World Record holder for the pet fish with the […]

I just played a fun online game called, “Where on Earth” by Point 2 Explore.com which was developed for educational museums and science centers. It shows landmarks from across the globe using NASA satellite photos and a player has three guesses of the location. If you have ever attended any geo-spatial related conferences, it is […]